59 year old Erika blogs about the day to day challenges of MS, with her own style of humor. This is not your typical medical blog.

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To Kill A Mockingbird

I hardly think Harper Lee actually intended her iconic book to be a manual to kill a bird, but I am ready to kill one myself. I leave my window open at night in an attempt to keep my body temperature below “stun” level on the heat scale (with mixed results, I might add), and I appreciate the cooler temps when they waft in.

About 3 months ago, as I’m drifting off to sleep I hear this “Kitty Kitty Kitty” very distinctly outside my window. Huh. I rouse myself enough to confirm that my beloved Clark is with me on the bed, and then attempt to drift back off. “Bring Bring Bring” goes my neighbors alarm clock. Huh. Odd, I know she’s a maternity nurse with odd hours, so maybe that’s it.

Then it’s “Tweet Tweet Tweet”, “Caw Caw Caw”, “Kaweep Kaweep Kaweep”, and then “Kitty Kitty Kitty” again. Oh for pete’s sake. This damn bird has every single neighborhood noise memorized and is stuck on some kind of a repeat audio loop of them all. Aren’t birds supposed to peppy in the daytime? This thing puts the owls to shame.

My next door neighbor confirms it’s a mockingbird, and that her alarm does not go off in the middle of the night. In fact, poor thing gets jolted awake on a regular basis by her “alarm clock”.

I’m not sure what to do. Obviously, even if I had the heart to kill a bird and the means to do it, I don’t want to kill a mockingbird. To quote Ms. Lee “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy… but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” And there you go.

I’ll just go on covering my head with a pillow and hope that it doesn’t mock my retorts to it’s “singing” all over the neighborhood.